And there were multiple dreams of boats in Trigag, a leaky one on day 2, the boat race with the spirit controlled boat on day 5 and the Navy Ship incident dream on day 7.

Day 1

Dream: Martial arts and unarmed combat.

Ritual: We perform the first Zalty ritual hungry, before breakfast. We hadn’t written our own calling yet, so we used the one from the book. We did use our own playlist. We skipped the part of the calling where you drank the rum, and it seems Zalty was not impressed with that…

“What do you want with me?” he demanded grumpily.

I realised we needed to drink the rum, asked Zalty if this was so and he confirmed it was…

“Won’t even drink a toast with me eh?”

I decided to get the rum, however before I got up, Dana rose and headed to where we kept it. I realised Zalty must have told her the same thing. We added a couple of drops of Doombringer’s spiced rum to the rum in the hip flask. We took a couple of sips and toasted Zalty. This had the effect of improving his mood considerably.

Unlike the other godforms, we had a couple of guests staying during Zalty week. I asked about this and Zalty promised to take good care of them. We also planned a trip to Loch Ness and we discussed the possibility of a boat. Zalty promised to ensure the weather was good for the boat.

We also discussed the career plans 663 suggested for me. Zalty rubbed his beard. “It’s not a bad idea. It won’t be easy.” He repeated “It won’t be easy” under his breath a few times as if thinking things through. “Leave it with me a while, I’ll see if I can come up with a plan.”

Day 2

Ritual 1: Our guests, Tara and Akira, had arrived but we weren’t yet prepared to involve them in our Zalty daily practise, so Dana and I snuck out to the garden altar with a little rum.

I intended to do a drawing or sigil, but Zalty interupted me with some financial advice, Piracy is the answer.

Confused, I ask for clarification. We discuss how pirates, internally, had advanced egalitarian politics and in dividing their spoils.

Rain interupted at this point and we retreated to another Zalty altar we had set up in our bedroom. This was the portable altar we planned to take camping.

Zalty told me how KIA had from the beginning been a band of pirates, that we need to embrace our pirate culture more, in imagery, organisation and attitudes. He gave me a sigil to help us achieve this goal.

Ritual 2: When Tara and Akira are out, Dana and I use the opportunity to perform a second ritual. I use the time to do a more artistic version of the sigil Zalty gave me earlier…

Day 3

Pareidolia: Dana notices a pareidolia in our bedroom that resembles a blue bearded pirate, smiling but with sad or tired eyes.

Ritual: Dana and Tara go out for a walk and I introduce Akira to Zalty. I explain a little about what Zalty is about, we do a toast of rum before the alta, saying “To Zalty Yung and Ole!”

Then we meditate upon the sigil.

I would like to ask you for an automatic drawing.

“Aye, that we can do.”

Don’t think I haven’t noticed that I haven’t actually seen you yet either!

“Aye, well do the drawing and I’ll show you how you need to see me…”

Zalty explains that at the moment I need to be far seeing to see the obstacles that lie ahead. This is not a time of plain sailing…

Day 4

All fools day.

Ritual: Morning before heading to Loch Ness. Decide to dress somewhat like a pirate, as does Dana. Zalty gives me tarot spread based on his sigil. I say tarot, it can easily be adapted for many other divination systems. It has the form of a cross.

Centre Card: The Capn. The signifier. The qualities of the questioner in relation to the question. Or perhaps the leader of a project the question is about.

Right Card: Bow: Obvious opportunities and obstacles. Can be more than one card. What the Capn can see with the naked eye from the deck.

Left Card: Stern: The Crew. Do they have the Capns back or do they plan to stab them in it? Mutineers or loyal to the end? What strengths and weaknesses do the Capns allies and supporters have? Can be more than one card.

Top card: Crows nest: Lookout. The lookout uses height advantage and a telescope to alert the Capn of opportunities and dangers not immediately obvious. Can be more than one card.

Bottom card: The hold. What treasure, supplies, rations and other cargo does the Capn have to aid them in their journey? Are they well stocked or a few days from mutiny?

Day 5

Boat ritual on Loch Ness: The four of us get in a small motor boat we hired to sail on the Loch. Dana and I are dressed somewhat like pirates. Akira wears necromancer robes. I have in my pocket a sigil of Zalty and a hip flask of spiced rum. Dana has a bottle with another sigil of Zalty inside it, which she throws into the Loch. Akira, as a necromancer, raises Nessie from the dead. In keeping with my automatic drawing, I scan around with my telescope. This was perhaps the most fun and most Zalty of all the rituals this week. Quite an experience. The wind was up and the waves were a little terrifying and the water freezing. We all got quite wet. Some of the boat dreams from Trigag week seem prophetic…

Day 6

Shadowrun in the ruins of Boleskine House: It was gone midnight, so technically day 6. Akira wanted to visit Boleskine House. So Dana lead the way. Tara stayed behind this time as she was tired. At first we were just going to look at the cemetery. We had avoided going to the house itself in the past out of respect to private owners hostile to visitors. But it occurred to us that since it was now a ruin, no-one would be there. So we snuck in. I do not mind admitting that Dana pushed us onwards when Akira and I were both ready to turn back. She became our ‘fearless leader’, a title given to the main character in the Shadowrun: Dragonfall computer game by one their team mates.

Ritual: Back home from our trip, I asked Zalty for a tarot reading using the spread he taught me on Day 4. The subject was the project to Save Boleskine House…

Quick interpretation: A lot of work and a very stressful endeavour. We do however have a lot of resources, friends and allies to draw on, and there is a great opportunity in the long run. The project is more than it first appears to be…

Day 7

Ritual: We finally made our customised calling to Zalty today. On days 2-6 we simply used an abridged calling of Praise Zalty, Yung and Ole! Also, instead of our Zalty playlist, this time we used the youtube video “DKMU – Zalty Gnosis (Keelhauled)” on loop throughout the ritual.

For the first time I persuaded Zalty to manifest a visual appearance. After a moment as a cartoon pirate they transformed into the ‘Fisherman of God’ character from the film “The Pirate” we had watched earlier in the week.

We had an interesting discussion about the path ahead, and where I expressed uncertainty, he sensed fear. Sensing this fear he gave me a pep talk, inspiring in me the courage to do what needed to be done to take the opportunity before me.

We also discussed potential spirit allies and I mentioned Red King, and Zalty confirmed this but added that we would also need to look beyond the DKMU godforms, without specifying where.

I thanked Zalty for the amazing time and the results already manifest, and he thanked me back claiming it was a pleasure for him also.

Preparation

Before we decided to go through the godform cycle, as we were reading the book on the dkmu godforms, I felt inspired to make this image of Trigag. I have a painting in a similar configuration of the character Leviathan from the Illuminatus! trilogy. The only difference is that Leviathan was white, and I painted their eye horizontally. Anyway, I drew this before I had performed a formal evocation of Trigag, but I like it enough to share all the same. This is a sketch rather than a finished artwork…

Day 1

This time Dana made the sigil and prepared the altar. We started the ritual late, and were quite tired by the time we did. Also I hadn’t had time to prepare the calling, so we decided that on this first day a meditation would suffice. I had doubts about making successful contact because it seemed insufficient.

However, eventually I heard Trigag chastise me, telling me everything I need to make contact was present, “the altar is prepared, the music is honouring, the incense is pleasing, the sigil is before you…”

The conversation I had with Trigag is, on reflection, reading it back, very revealing. We discussed my fear of losing my happy life holding me back from achieving what I really want. He scoffed at some of my ideas to make money in alternative ways and actually gave me advice that at the time sounded vague, but which now sounds spot on. He flattered me a bit with some comments about my writing in comparison to a couple of famous authors. I’m not sure if he meant that I write better, or if he meant I have better stories to tell though. After all, he did then tell me I was a little rusty with that kind of writing, so perhaps he did mean the latter.

Before the ritual we ate a Chinese. We saved the fortune cookies to open in the ritual. Mine read “Your greatest virtue is modesty”. That seems to have fit the theme of self-doubt that emerged from my conversation with Trigag.

Day 2

Dream 1: Looking for a lost boy in Asia. (When I awoke, Dana told me she also had dreams of looking for lost people).

Dream 2: I was persuading Dana to get into a leaking boat, convinced it was good enough to get us where we needed to go, but she was expressing concern. We got in, and though it was a little wet, we sailed safely enough down stream, between the trees. Suddenly however the boat came out of the trees as the stream fed into a bay. To the right was a huge 10m wave heading our way. “Oh fuck” I exclaimed, realising we were in trouble…

Bath: I saw an inverse of one the Trigag paintings in the bath, the one with the white face with black triangle. In the bath, as I was getting in, my shadow created a black figure, and on the face some reflection of light created a white triangle…

Film:Pearl Button, This is a moving artistic and political documentary about disappeared people in Chili, the Indians of Patagonia, the water people, water, the sea and the stars. Some of the Indians of Patagonia had black and white make up in patterns that resembled that painting of Trigag with the white face with black triangle.

Ritual: We had prepared the calling this time and opened with a Kia IAO and the calling. I asked Trigag to guide an automatic drawing for me and got this…

When I asked for an interpretation he replied that it was for me to interpret. Then he added, “maybe not even you, maybe it is for others to analyse and understand you by.”

Day 3

Film: We watched ‘Lightkeepers’ A romantic comedy that was perhaps more Zalty than Trigag.

Ritual: We decided to do the ritual lying down on bean bags for a longer or deeper meditation. Or maybe it was because we were pretty tired as usual for a Friday evening.

I ended up visualising the Trigag/Leviathan sketch I had done before the cycle started, as mentioned in the preparation. I asked Trigag what they thought of the image and they gave me a long reply…

“It is an amusing image. If Ellis is Eris in the trilogy, then I am Leviathan, and certainly we are the same archetype that appears in fiction as Leviathan, Cthulhu, Moby Dick, Kumugwe. All masks of the same mystery.

Of course Leviathan in Illuminatus is white, a reference to Moby Dick, whereas I am black. So how do we reconcile that? Well the Gnostic Leviathan was not a creature of the sea, but a cosmic serpent, the ouroborus Milky Way. If you look at the Milky Way you see only the stars gathered in the spiral arm. But what gathered them? A giant all consuming black hole.

The light of the stars is no more the galaxy than the glowing lure is the deep sea angler fish.”

Day 4

Dreams: I had dreams of being addicted to starting new (erotic) relationships. This is weird because I feel awkward and really have to push myself outside of my comfort zone to engage in new relationships of that kind and am thankful that I’m in a long term loving relationship. But maybe there is some kind of excitement that comes along with the awkwardness I fear? Certainly no where near enough reward to sacrifice the good thing Dana and I have together though.

Ritual: Today the weather was pretty good, the warmest of the year so far at that point. (14C, well it is the Scottish Highlands! ), so I drew the sigil outside on a shell, using the variant obtained by Stephen Branch. After lighting some joss sticks and meditating focused on the sigil for a time I closed my eyes and saw the sigil entering me and growing to envelop me from within.

I asked about the Fotamecus ritual we had planned, since this was daylight savings weekend and we had a marked clock we wanted to sacrifice. Trigag approved of the rite and promised to lend energy in support of it. Their reasoning had to do with mistaking a predictable rhythm that only occurs in specific conditions with time itself. Outside of those conditions of speed, gravity and pressure, time behaves differently. He then gave me an overview of relativity with the example of two particles passing by each other, each travelling at the speed of light in opposite directs. I admit my physics knowledge isn’t really equipped to understand this, but apparently time distorts in some way locally such that the relative speed between them as they pass is still no greater than the speed of light.

Trigag identified with Chronos. Not the younger ordered time Chronos, but the older consort of Ananke, the serpentine god of flowing time. They then told me that stars to them were like krill to a whale, and the scale of time experienced by creatures living around such a star was of little significance. They then warned me of the consequences of moving away from a rigid time based career to something more achronistic.

This might tie in with the sigil from Ino concerning crypto currency economy. I expressed my fear that this might not be workable. Trigag simply responded that it didn’t matter if it was workable, I had to try.

Fotamecus Film Magic: In a homage to the original fotamecus film magic ritual, we made a magical film of a clock marked with the sigil which we ultimately smash with a hammer. We haven’t edited or even looked at this footage yet, so I can only hope it is usable. The magic itself was pretty dramatic.

Day 5

Dream: On a beach and I notice some white shapes on a rock. At first I think they are seals but then I realise they are sheep. They are trapped by the tide and need to get to safety. I urge them to swim ashore and they come towards the beach through the water. Either they swim or the water is shallow enough for them to wade. We end up on a strange square of land with some crops. I sense the need to bring more soil so it remains above sea level. I erect a step ladder for the sheep to climb higher.

Dream 2: There is a boat race and everyone marvels at my sailing skill, skimming across giant waves, launching off them into the air like they are ramps, and landing just right to keep speed, easilly speeding past my more cautious competitors. However, little do they know, it is not skill but magic. Some spirit sails the boat for me and I am terrified by the risky manoeuvres it makes, holding on for dear life!

Garden: Another nice day weather wise we spend more time in the garden. Dana prepares the Zalty sigil whilst I work on the one for Red King.

Ritual: We again used the Stephen Branch variant Trigag sigil, this time in chalk by our outdoor chimney fire. We meditated sitting in reclining garden chairs. This time I asked about what I feared most. There followed an interesting discussion in which Trigag probed me for things I feared. I’m opting to keep this discussion between myself and Trigag however…

In the fire afterwards I saw a pareidolia of the black rat.

Day 6

Dream: In a small house with the black rat and other rats running around. I had to tell a woman to be careful of the rat babies crawling around in the carpet, because the black rat would become a lot less friendly if anything happened to them through her carelessness, such as standing on one.

Ritual: Today we decided to try scrying in the cuttlefish ink bowl. Dana and I discussed our different scrying techniques. Dana shared her technique of waiting for pareidolia to appear in the blurring shapes that appear in the bowl, whereas I shared mine which was to wait for image flashes, or visions, to interrupt a single minded object concentration on the blackness. In either case a mental note of the forms is made. I decided to try out Dana’s technique.

My own sequence of images were:

Trigag sigil (This was deliberately visualised)

Cuttlefish (Perhaps because I knew the ink came from cuttlefish).

Crescent Moon

Dark Moon (It was new moon that day)

Deathstar

Ouroboros

Xenomorph young

Black crab

Spider crab

Alien spider crab entities

Selkies/Seals

Day 7

Dream: A very strange dream about a scandal in which a British Navy vessel hoses down a smaller ship of Japanese women in distress, sparking an international incident.

Ritual: This time we used the DKMU – Starshadow video on loop from youtube instead of our playlist. For this reason we included it in the youtube Trigag playlist we made. Amusingly we seemed to be view 666 of the video when I started playing. I was thinking of the number 666 when we started the ritual, but Trigag told me “Stop being distracted by trivialities.”

I appologised, explaining that it doesn’t take much to amuse us because our lives are so dull.

“On the contrary, your lives are anything but dull. I find your kind quite fascinating. That something so complex could exist at such a microscopic scale of space and time. That a whole civilisation of your kind can rise and fall in the time it takes for me to blink my eye.”

I asked Trigag if they had any parting wisdom to share. They disdained wisdom, advising only the pursuit of power. To obtain power they advised growing big, obtaining mass by whatever means possible, without compromising myself in the process, so that eventually my gravity becomes self sustaining, drawing in new mass by the very nature of existing. They then gave me as sigil for increasing my mass, gravity, power and attraction.

Preparation

This time Dana and I collaborated on creating the sigil focus. We used a ‘faerie door’ we had obtained sometime previously, but never used. It seemed perfect for Ino. It is a self standing door constructed from wood. Dana died this with metallic black wood dye, so the grain of the wood is still visible and creates an effect. I painted the sigils on top with a silver enamel. As Ino has two sigils, a closed form and an open form, I painted each side of the door with one of the variants.

Day 1

Dream: Was with a man from the ‘shared house’ dream from last night (see week 2 day 7 dream 4). We are sitting on a large outdoor garbage bin, deciding which of two doors to take. It felt partly like the scene in Labyrinth where Sarah had to solve a riddle to decide between two doors, but also like the ‘helping hands’ scene in that was no actual riddle presented.

When I made the decision a woman appeared and made us get off the bins and form an orderly queue. I know she was there and heard her commands but have no memory of actually looking at her. Was this Ino? By ‘us’, I mean all the guys from the shared house dream had appeared to help form the queue. I also think one of them was in the ‘moving house’ dream.

I then got a revelation about the two forms of Ino. The closed door for possibilities is complemented by the open door of pathways, because once you have chosen a preferred possibility, you then need to know how to reach it.

Ritual: We both performed the Kia IAO centring. We both read from our calling to Ino, in which we inserted a modified line from the KIA Litany, “We have made a secret door the manifestation.” Dana rang the chimes.

I began with an unguided pathworking from the Ziggurat of 663 into the surrounding ruins, much of it reclaimed by jungle or buried in ash. I was looking for a door. When I came to one my mind began buzzing with ideas. When I realised these were coming from Ino I asked why she was giving me ideas on that topic. Apparently I asked. Perhaps a stray thought, worry or concern during the meditation.

I mostly sensed her presence but she did appear in glimpses. I suspect these were more inspirations of how she might look rather than actually being her though.

She seemed excited when I asked about the possibilities for the week ahead.

When I asked about the idea for a novel I got in week one, with Ellis, she claimed credit for it. Apparently she was with me even back then?

She didn’t like my idea of a painting for her at all. She gave me plenty of alternative inspirations she thought were better.

We discussed a few more topics before Dana closed the ritual with a final chime.

Day 2

Today I asked Ino for an automatic drawing and got this one…

Ino declined to explain the drawing, saying it was up to me, although she did offer to write a story based on it.

Ino also advised me that Trigag would be very agreeable to helping with the Fotamecus ritual we had planned for the spring time change.

I thanked her and said goodnight.

Day 3

Dream 1: This involves small teams of soldiers fighting a man eating giraffe-like monster as it walks between the ruins of some old tower blocks in a deserted city. I was a soldier with a grenade launcher. My notes concern the window I was shooting through as a symbol of Ino, and also the door I escaped through when my grenades failed to do any significant harm to the creature.

Dream 2: An 17th/18th century battle with sabres. A man who attempts to denounce a colleague as a demon after seeing his reflection in a shield, but the others won’t turn on him because he single handedly liberated a ship. A demonic pirate captain? Zalty?

Ritual: Today I talked to Ino concerning a project I wanted to do collecting together some of the best material on KIA into short booklets. Ino advised I start with Octarine Magic.

Day 4

Dream: An agent trying to help someone escape from a house being searched by secret police. A pirate boy with two toy cutlasses in the garden. Three orthodox Jewish men in traditional atire, running away from something down the street, that something turning out to be like ‘amber’ from the series ‘Fringe’.

Ritual: Today Dana and I coordinated our efforts to discuss the same project with Ino and compare notes. This proved illuminating as the message we got contrasted with the usual roles we fall into when discussing the project, helping us both to see each others viewpoint from a different angle.

Day 5

I make an Ino stone for the garden altar. It was however too cold and windy to sit out.

Film: We watch ‘Kubo and the two Strings’. In addition to a lunar with faceless sisters being Ino references, a magic ship references Zalty, and lake monster with hypnotic eyes references Trigag.

Ritual: Got some further advice on preparing a document of the KIA godforms.

Day 6

Ritual: Apparently Ino has asked Dana for monthly full moon rituals. Tonight Ino gave me a sigil to use alongside the prosperity web in one of these full moon rituals. The purpose of the sigil is to open our eyes to working in the digital crypto economy and decreasing our dependence on traditional economy.

Day 7

Sighting: Saw a strange light in the sky before the ritual. 90% certain it was just a plane. We see lots of planes most nights, however this one did not behave like the others and seemed strange.

Ritual: I asked Ino for an automatic writing…

I know what you wanted to write but I have a different message for you. I’m glad you’re listening because what is the point of asking for an automatic writing if you pre-plan what you might write in it?

I know.

I know more than you think I know. I want you to know that. I want you to know that I know. I want you to know that I know that I know that you know that I know. But really. As you pass through the gate, beware! Be aware! For through here lie dragons! Monsters! Behemoths! The dread Trigag! Pirates! Some try to scare you, others tempt you.

I know. Tempt you with what I hear you ask? Hidden treasure, adventure, freedom, a life less ordinary.

I know what you pirates seek. Sovereignty. It is hard being a slave. Harder still to be free in a world that wants you to stay a slave and does everything it can to re-enslave you.

I know. But allow the adventure to transform you and you will be equipped to rise to the challenges. You will be prepared to face failure because success is never guaranteed. That would be too easy wouldn’t it? If it was easy, everyone would do it. I know.

Our second week of the DKMU godform cycle took place between March 8th and March 14th.

Preparation

After finishing the seventh ritual of our week with Ellis, Dana and I replaced the altar with one for 663, the Doombringer, following the advice from book, using items we had lying around. We must have got something right as I found myself dreaming of tribal masks, a motif of the doombringer, that very night, and we hadn’t even performed the first ritual yet. In the dream we were showing a woman intruder out of our house (Ellis?) but she instead guides us into our bedroom were she instructs Dana to fetch a brass tribal mask from a high shelf. Beside this mask was another one, wooden with horns, and a furry leather scalp.

Day 1

Our first ritual begins with a Kia IAO centring and a calling to 663 personalised, but based on the one in the book. We then began an unguided pathworking, beginning in the jungle, by the huge cobweb of Ellis and walking through it to find the lost city where 663 has his ziggurat. The path to city began completely overgrown but started to open out into a roadway through the trees. I caught a glimpse of the black ziggurat at the end of the road, between the broad leaves of the trees and plants. As I did so, the spacial and time distortion effect started kicking in. The pyramid seemed at once near and far, large and small, towering above and short and below. Eventually I felt like I was floating above it in the air.

As I could not see 663 when it was behaving like this I decided I had to land at the base of the steps and walk up them. I had to concentrate on placing my foot on the first step. No sooner had I done so than I caught my first glimpse of the figure on the top. They appeared to be wearing a tribal mask with a huge feathered headdress. As I climbed up further I noticed they were dancing and wearing a suit. I began to detect feline features in the mask, almost cartoon like. The mask also seemed to trail a ‘Chinese dragon costume’ suggestive of a caterpillar. They occasionally paused from their dance to take a puff from a pipe before resuming.

When I reached the top 663 settled into more stillness based asana. After greetings I asked 663 if I could be rebuilt.

“For what purpose?” he responded.

At first I wasn’t sure. Thinking as quick as I could I answered “To be what I need to be.”, thinking this a wise answer.

But 663 was having none of it, “Need to be for what purpose?”

I suggested perhaps to help achieve the greatest happiness on Earth. 663 then showed me a vision of a future in which everyone is so drugged into a mindless happiness that gladly allow genocide and environmental destruction, walking blissfully to their own regimented deaths. “Are you sure you want this?” he teased?

“Well no” I replied slightly deflated. I clarified that what I meant was to become what I needed in order to ensure humanity prospered, lived in harmony with the environment, achieved global peace and explored the stars.

When I then got lost in some thoughts about my job, 663 interrupted them by saying “This! You need to end this!”

“My job?” I’m not sure if 663 meant ending my job or was just annoyed at me getting distracted during our conversation, but he insisted I had till the end of the year but the sooner the better. This was indeed a difficult truth, if it be so, as I am quite comfortable in my current position, even if the commute is tiresome, especially in the winter. Having my first message I bid 663 goodbye, saying I would be back. 663 grinned their consent and waved goodbye.

Day 2

Dream: I had a dream about confronting a ghost in a train station that everyone else ran from in terror. As the ghost tried to claim me I breathed small shards of light calmly into its face and it evaporated.

Ritual: Today I asked 663 for a semi-automatic drawing, based on how I saw him yesterday. He agreed…

At one point Dana fetched some spiced rum which she placed in a skull shaped glass to put on the altar. She got some on her lips and started choking. As she enjoys vastly more spicy food than I can handle, I gathered from this that it must be very hot!

I said to 663, “Oh yes! We had an offering to Ellis from day 1.

“Yes, don’t think I didn’t notice.”

“Hopefully this makes up for it?” I enquired?

“It’ll do.” he accepted.

Day 3

Film: Today we watched the film ‘After the Dark’, a very philosophical film that we thought fit the theme of doombringer quite well. We had curry during the film and 663 got a bowl of this on their altar.

Ritual: Also today I managed to get the playlist for 663 working in both Clementine and VLC, so we could play from two sources simultaneously, as it is reputed to be pleasing to 663 to do this.

I visualised myself walking up the steps, but 663 got impatient with me, “Come, come” he said, “you don’t need to do that again!” and I felt this time I could easily fly up to the top.

Tonight I planned to do a tarot reading, and before I asked or drew a card I began thinking about wealth and success and what I had to teach magically. I am not a millionaire, or quite frankly, anywhere close to becoming one. But that in and of itself is not a bad point. Being a millionaire does not make you a good magician, even less a good teacher of magic. The vast majority of people that choose a rich magician as a teacher, hoping they too will become rich following their advice, are in for a big disappointment.

Other students turn therefore to the other extreme, austere monks, or remote shaman able to survive in jungle or tundra, or traditions that survive in countries experiencing extremes of poverty. It is well they do, because there is much that can be learned by those that successfully navigate through poverty, or who reject a lifestyle based on material possessions. But again, the vast majority of such students, not being born into such desperate situations, will find it very difficult to adapt to such situations, or adapt the teachings into anything useful for modern living without considerably watering them down.

So herein lies the strength of a teacher that experiences a similar level of wealth to the student. The focus then becomes not on financial success, or ability to live an austere life, but rather in successfully navigating through life’s obstacles and living a fulfulling and happy life. And demonstrating how magic helps with this.

Then I asked 663 if I could pull a card on how we might best centre ourselves in the coming turbulance, how best to survive. I decided to use the ‘Ghetto tarot’. A card jumped out when shuffling and I looked and saw the 9 of coins. It depicted a white dressed woman holding something. 663 said it was the white queen and that she would have advice for us.

He had little else to offer so I asked if I could read from the booklet. It read…

“Sometimes you just have to remind myself that all in all life can be pretty damn good. Share your inner riches with the world.”

In hindsight, it seems like 663 gave me the interpretation before I picked the card.

Day 4

I made a stone with the 663 sigil for the garden altar and we sat by this during lunch.

Ritual: We did a calling for 663 and lit the black ziggurat incense cones. We added a couple of drops of the super hot spiced rum to normal rum and used this with normal rum, diluted with ice and ginger wine, and used this as sacrament.

I asked about my broken rib. He said I just needed more rest, but also that my situation would improve when my monitors at work were raised. That was a couple weeks before they were raised, and has proved to be true, I no longer need painkillers to be at work.

Today 663 brought up my relationship with Dana. The material here is deeply personal so we won’t be sharing it all, but after teasing me a lot, he came up with advice on improving our financial cooperation, and a sigil to focus us on achieving that goal…

He also asked me to paint his face.

Day 5

Dream 1: This dream involved someone swinging from a rope with a leopard biting their leg. 663 in cat form?

Dream 2: On a university campus a portal opens to another world. As a young woman I follow an older woman through the portal. The portal had the form of a rotating lotus that had a symbol inside a bit like part of the 663 sigil:

On the other side however I lost track of the woman and met a young girl and had a conversation about the location of a ‘monster’ I was apparently looking for. I was searching for a secret panel in a wall but the girl told me it was no use, all sorts of creatures lived in that place but they only came out when the wanted to. She resembled, in dress and manner, Clara (the disabled friend of Heidi from the children’s story) only she could walk. Now I think of it, this wouldn’t look to different from Alice from Lewis Carroll’s stories, but that never occurred to me during the dream, or when writing it up.She lead me to a window and saw a coastline of white cliffs and white chalky islands. We were moving passed them, implying the window was from the inside of a boat. I wanted to open a window but there were some dying patients and I didn’t want to disturb them so quietly left.The room filled up with some kind of party, people dressed in evening wear, I was no longer a young woman but my adult self. I saw a shortish blond man that looked familiar, like I worked with him on the other side of the portal, but he just winked and moved on. I got pulled into a group where the eccentric woman had returned, but I had forgotten I was looking for her. She was chatting so I thought to move on but she stopped me.Now face to face she stated “You were talking about Rockamed?”After initial confusion and confirmation of the name I evasively answered that I write about a lot of religious subjects.She announced that she herself had written a book on tarot and that she was 67 years old. And asked me if I remembered.She also asked me about school and I answered more deeply than I would have in waking life, revealing an inner truth that I wasn’t conscious of but which now makes sense.

Analysis: Was this the message from white queen that 663 told me about? Was the chalky islands Zalty? Was the implied boat we were in Zalty? Was the winking blonde man 663?

Ritual: I asked 663 if he was the winking blonde man in the dream. He said he was. I then asked him about many experiences throughout my childhood and he identified some of them as himself and one as Red King.I then asked about a stone, remembering that 663 will sometimes rebuild you with a shamanic stone. A stone I was once gifted, but long lost, appeared in head. When I was much younger I ran a correspondence course on chaos magic for teenagers called ‘The Illuminati Youth’. One of my students, Soror Thyme 3981, gave me a crystal she purchased from a Bedouin tribesman in the Sinai desert, a toothless man she met on the way to St Catherins, the site of the biblical burning bush. 663 told me I would have a dream about the rib in due course, and that I should re-read her letters, which I did.

Day 6

Ritual: 663 appeared playfully, with the image of a pink elephant. Confusedly I asked why he was appearing in this form and he joked “Silly, that isn’t an elephants trunk…”

The undulating trunk then seemed disconnected from any head and transformed into a very cartoony caterpillar. As I focused on the face it became cheshire cat like and the segments of the caterpillar collapsed into each other one by one until they resolved themselves into the body of the cat, which all the while maintained a wide grin.

I had been experiencing a lot of dreams about suited agents, perhaps itself only a result of my working an MIB agent paradigm for a time, but given 663s own suited nature I asked if any of these agents were to do with him.

As I was waiting for Dana to finish I felt a sudden brief pain or weird tingling in my rib. It occurred to me suddenly to ask 663 if he was putting the stone in. He replied that it was as good a time as any. I answered that I thought he was going to do it in a dream, but he shrugged and put three, possibly contradictory thoughts into my head:

I had the dream but don’t remember.

The dream is still to come but linked to this moment.

This is all the dream of Red King anyway, so it is in a dream.

The seem to exhibit a past, future, present trinity.

663 then told me the reason I had to re-read her letter was so that I remembered how good a teacher I was, even back then, and the choice of stone symbolises that.

Day 7

I had a series of dreams that take up three pages of my diary. I will summarise:

Dream 1: Looking at starry sky. A few shooting stars appear. Suddenly lots of stars started moving in a weird way, each moving back and forth quickly between two points, but each at different angles. “What is that?” I exclaim to those watching with me. Suddenly unannounced fireworks start and cover up the strange lights.

Dream 2: Faery red queen appears in a gymnasium, and organises a throw-catch game with a rugby style ball. I don’t recognise her as such but feel I should know her. I catch the ball, and remembering my injury decide to try and throw with my left arm. However I mis-throw and the ball spins speedily into the back of someone’s head. Embarrassed, I apologise.

Dream 3: House moving. Sort of like a combination of every home I’ve ever moved out of. A common recurring dream setting (although mostly appears in a shortly after moved in state). For some reason I have an idea that there is a secret altar to Ellis hidden somewhere above a window in a hidden alcove. You had to poke your head through a hole in the ceiling to see it. There was an Ellis sigil there with a couple of red candles and real cobwebs.

Dream 4: Same/similar recurring dream house but lived in. Living space has front door opening directly to street. Sharing house with a bunch of guys on various seats and sofas. One gets a delivery. Postman tries to peak as the guy opens the box but he gets defensive, covering it and saying ‘Hey!’

Some guys got excited and told me someone I hadn’t seen in a while was coming and I was in for a surprise. The faery red queen appears, although I again I fail to recognise her. We sit awkwardly looking at each other as she waits for me to recognise her. She asks what I think about Scottish Independence and I answer ‘YES!’

Ritual: This time we try and create as much silence and darkness as we can manage in our bungalow, for the sensory deprivation approach to 663. We turned the playlist off when we began the calling. Dana used our incense censor to distribute the 663 incense liberally around our home. After the calling we snuffed all the candles and assumed asanas. I didn’t get much personal communication but I 663 did share some personal story behind himself that may or may not be of interest to others.

The sole survivor after the collapse of a civilisation, sitting lonely atop a relic of the past, doing the only thing left to do in such a situation, meditation and telepathic communication with other magicians from other worlds and times.

I thanked him for our time together, and for the rebuilding of my rib. I promised to return now we had formed a friendship.

Dana Varahi and myself decided to engage in the DKMU Godform cycle. Our first week took place between March 1st and March 7th, and concerned the egregore behind the web created the Linking Sigil, the Red Queen, Ellis. Dana has written her own account of this first week. Ellis serves as the primary point of contact for connecting with the DKMU godforms. Judging from the accounts of others, it seems the bare minimum was to do one evocation per week, one per godform. Being no stranger to daily practice, Dana and I have opted to do a daily evocation, seven per week, thus seven per godform. Here follows an account of my seven days with Ellis.

Preparation:

The period between deciding to do the cycle and actually starting. I have a memory of a dream where a character mentioned Trigag, one of godforms later in the cycle, but I don’t remember much detail. We had prepared the sigil and many of the altar decorations in the days preceding the start. This time we put lots of thought into it and really followed the advice in the book concerning things Ellis likes, themes and correspondence. Last time we went in blind and got mixed results.

On the night before starting, after the altar was fully in place, we lit the red candles, burned incense and did a brief meditation, getting us in the mood.

Day 1

During the day Dana prepared a couple of jugs of Sangria as sacrament. We prepared our journals and sketchbooks, cards for divination and pens and pencils before the altar ready for any direction we may be inspired to take, such as divination by card, automatic drawing, automatic writing, or just recording our communion as we went.

We listened to the Ellis playlist I had prepared during the day, building the connection. This time we turned it off for the actual ritual.

To kick the whole godform cycle off we performed a long version of the Kia IAO Centring. This is like the normal version but the IAO part is repeated facing each of the four directions and the Kia part is repeated after the IAO parts, after returning to face the altar. I then read out the ‘Calling to Ellis’ and Dana made the chimes at appropriate moments. This calling was slightly personalised but largely based on the one in the book, The DKMU Godforms.

Once I felt in contact with Ellis, I invited her to use me to make an automatic writing. What follows is my transcription of her words.

“I Ellis say to you that you should build and strengthen your connections. Build your friendships and maintain them. Connect. Engage. Show an interest in them. Build a world wide network.

Work with others, use their material, work through their systems. Expand your own, and support and encourage those working with it.

I grant you a sigil to focus this intent…”

There followed a sigil much like the LS sigil but with some modifications.

Day 2

This time we left the Ellis playlist on during the ritual and started with the short form of the Kia IAO and another ‘Calling to Ellis’. I felt inspired to do a drawing of the sigil from Day 1 surrounded by automatic sigils around the edges. As I made this sigil I meditated upon the message.

I asked Ellis if she thought I should share the message or whether it was a personal message for me. She said it was for everyone and I should share it.

Day 3

After re-reading the description of the glitterbomb sigil with Dana, we decided to empower our YES unicorn for compasionate independence with it, as it seemed a good fit. I added a pound symbol to the take in point and a euro symbol to the transform point. This seemed a good way to represent transferring support in Scotland from Britain to Europe. Dana felted a fearie Ellis, noting the red and green are fae colours. “Red and Green should ne’er be seen together, ‘cept in service of the faerie queen.”

I also made an LS stone so we could commune with Ellis in the garden, and received a message from Ellis regarding the rotated symmetrical versions of her sigil I had made some months ago. In the DKMU Egregores book, Ellis given seven ‘associated archetypes’. Ellis told me how five of these related to four of the sigils I made, and one I should have made but hadn’t. The tri-LS relates to Ellis in her more Hecate aspect. The quad-LS relates to Ellis in her more Papa Legba like aspect. The pent-LS relates to Ellis at her most Erisian. The hept-LS, which I never made, apparently relates to Ellis in her Thelemic Babalon aspect. And the octo-LS relates to Ellis in her Grandmother Spider aspect.

Today we also did a simple meditation by the altar indoors, and I got a vision of Ellis as a faerie queen riding a black unicorn into battle followed by a host of fae warriors playing horns and beating drums whilst chanting a beautiful but defiant battle song. The mood was full of confidence.

Day 4

We spent the day in the city meeting some friends passing through the city we don’t get to meet very often, so our meditation today was briefer. I asked Ellis if she would be okay with me preparing some things for 663 and the other godforms in advance during her week, and she seemed content with the idea. I also asked about tagging the Linking Sigil onto my colour dolls, and she was okay with this idea but suggested that I should perhaps open them up in such a form as to be worked with by other remotely. As it turns out I didn’t get time to tag them during week one.

Day 5

Dana prepared the sigil for 663 whilst I prepared the one for Ino. We watched a film called ‘The Frame’. I was expecting something cyberpunk, but instead got something rather oddly ‘Through the Looking Glass’, but in a gritty crime kind of way. We thought the film had Ellisian qualities.

After a couple of days where we did just meditation we renewed the strength of our contact with the Kia IAO short form and an Ellis calling. This time Ellis told me that there were godforms behind each of the #OpIntruder sigils and that we should prepare a cycle for them.

Day 6

Meditation again. At first I got nothing, and then Ellis just wanted the Sangria. But as Dana fetched the Sacrament from the fridge (we generally kept it cool there until the end of the ritual), Ellis requested that I attempt a painting of herself as the faerie red queen riding the black unicorn from day 3’s vision. She understands I probably won’t be able to do this until after the cycle is over.

Day 7

Two inspirations came today. The first is that after doing the DKMU godform cycle, we should do a similar one with godforms relating the KIA egregore. This will naturally include the KIA egregore herself, and also The Black Rat and Ronnie. Since Ronnie came from agent Trace, I had to get her permission to include him, but she consents, so that is three so far. It will grow.

The second was an idea for a novel.

In ritual I mainly received a strange political message about LS meaning Libertarian Socialism. The far bottom left corner of the political compass. I asked about the novel idea, and Ellis made the suggestion to move the setting to a complete fantasy world with fantasy nations and not an alternate Earth. This time we began by drinking sangria with Ellis and ended with the Kia IAO.

After the ritual, we dismantled the Ellis altar and assembled the one for 663 in preparation for Day 1 of the Doombringer.

I have been working with this pentacle for around sixteen years now. My relationship with it began when I was a neophyte in the Illuminates of Thanateros. In order to complete the training of an initiate, I had to choose one of the four elemental weapons to dedicate towards that initiation. I had become interested in the techniques of communing with spirits, an area in which my magic at the time seemed quite weak, and for this reason I choose the pentacle, or disk, as my weapon. At the time I received that initiation, in May 2001, I had the main side of the disk painted in black, gold and silver enamels. It consisted of a black unicursal octogram with a sigil of chaos in the centre on a gold and silver background.

However, my involvement with the IOT waned dramatically after becoming an initiate and sometime around 2004 or 5 I decided to leave the order. Whilst I really liked some of the people I knew from the order, I felt that it no longer had much to offer me, and it didn’t seem to want anything from me.

The second design wasn’t really mine. I painted it, but did so in a form that met the specifications of a small working group lead by another magician. I kept the black, silver and gold colour theme though, because I liked it. It incorporated a black sun design with 11 rays. I don’t remember exactly when I did this, but I suspect it was sometime around 2007.

As often happens in magical groups, I fell out with said magician, and thus no longer felt like having their design on my pentacle, so in 2009 I came up with the third design. This time it stuck. Third time lucky I guess!

This consists of a hexagram or shatkona, where the downwards black triangle contains a black vesica pisces, which itself contains a gold ringed black circle, all inside an eighteen rayed black sun on a silver blackground with gold sigils. This design has rich layers of symbolism. Four of the eighteen rays in the black sun form spokes pointing to the corners of a tetrahedron, the Platonic solid for fire. Three of these are larger, representing the alchemical tria prima of salt, sulphur and mercury. The number three appears three times, in that of the other six long rays, three wave clockwise and three wave anti-clockwise. The smaller rays return to the number four hinted at by the tetrahedron, in that it consists of four clockwise, four anti-clockwise and one straight ray. Here the symmetry represents duality, and the four elements, whereas the single straight point represents the transcendent Kia. In addition, the eight wavy small rays and single straight small ray represent octarine and the colours of magic.

Inside the hexagram is a rich symbol found in many cultures and traditions. In alchemy it represents the union of fire and water, the irreconcilables. In Hindu Tantra (in distinction to Buddhist Tantra), it represents the sexual union of Shiva (the white ascending triangle) with Shakti (the black descending triangle). The black circle with the gold ring represents a solar eclipse, the alignment of sun and moon.

However, whilst I had finally perfected the primary side of the disk, the underside had remained unfinished. There may have been an earlier attempt I’ve now forgotten about, but my latest design for this was based on a pattern I saw on a log from our local forest. This must have been around 2014/15. I was never really quite happy with this design and a couple of weeks ago I hit upon an idea more in tune with the primary side. I began with a gold base and pencilled in the line work I intended to fill with silver…

This design was an octo-LS. Basically eight linking sigils rotated about their point at 45 degree increments. This somewhat resembles a sigil of chaos without actually being one. Or maybe it is one, depending on your point of view. It certainly makes an interesting design…

This made for a good base. I deliberately made it quite rough, almost resembling graffiti. Yet my carefully constructed pencil and compass lines ensure that the design held a certain degree of symmetry. To complete the side though I picked a much finer brush to do the black…

This final layer consists of eight interlocking #OpIntruder CE5 sigils. The outer circles of each overlap with the two adjacent sigils. The domes interlock to form a central flower. The whole design looks like a warped unicursal octogram, an echo of the first design on the main side. It may have taken me a while, but I have finally got a complete design I can be happy with.

In my last blog I re-examined my old writings on the subject of sigils. This time I will be re-examining my old writings on the subject of servitors. This writing wasn’t bad, but my thinking shows traces of rigidity of thought. It looks like I was struggling with the fluidity of ‘what servitors are’ and what ‘types’ of servitors there ‘were’, rather than examining the different lenses through which we might understand them.

Fractal consciousness

“In the wind of the mind arises the turbulence called ‘I'” ~ Aleister Crowley

A year or so after writing that introduction I arrived at the idea of fractal consciousness. This helped me in my understanding of servitors considerably. The following is my attempt to explain the concept, starting with the consciousness of a monotheistic society. The story actually goes further back than that, but I’ve decided to start from the middle to keep it short. I’ve also simplified it a lot for the point of creating narrative, so bare with me if you know a lot about theology, and don’t take this as an accurate historical account if not.

Mono-consciousness

In the creation stories of the Abrahamic religions, a single creator God made humanity in its image. Where and when this view held sway as the dominant view of consciousness, our true self was considered an immortal soul, like the monotheistic God. A microcosm to the one true God’s macrocosm. Therefore we had a single consciousness, given free will by God to choose good or evil, but essentially good in its nature. All impulses, desires and voices in our heads telling us to do otherwise, were then by necessity seen as external. Demons tempting us towards evil. But not all voices were bad, some would advise us to stay on the path of God, and these were seen as angels, saints and in rare cases the voice of God himself.

Multi-consciousness

Psychology broke this view of consciousness. Freud began by dividing our consciousness into distinct working parts like an ego, an id and an unconscious. Jung took it further, adding in a large collection of archetypes, a shadow, an anima/animus. It comes as little surprise that Jung turned to survivals of pre-monotheist mysticism, such as Greek mythology, alchemy and Gnosticism for inspiration.

This non-monolithic model of the mind found resonance in the revival of polytheistic beliefs such as neo-paganism and Wicca which often embraced Jung’s ideas, but also found its way into Chaos Magic, with the idea of multiple selves, interested in different areas of our lives, such love, career, charisma, self-assertion. I found the simplicity of the chaos magic explanation, and its acceptance of the arbitrary nature of the divisions appealing.

Non-linear consciousness

At the same time, being able to look at arbitrary sections of consciousness as having their own consciousness that we can talk to, opens up interesting implications. It implies that all the multiple personalities connect and entwine, and that they too contain yet more mini-consciousnesses on a smaller scale. Crowley couldn’t have known when he used the word, but turbulence would eventually be modelled as fractals. So if the ‘I’ manifests from turbulence has he suggested, then it would imply that it also contained mini-versions of itself that contained mini versions of themselves.

But the fractal also extends upwards. Ideas such as group minds, egregores, emergent consciousness, and modelling institutions such as nations and corporations as entities; all rely on the idea of a kind of consciousness, no matter how primitive, being transmitted through the transfer of information between many individuals, whether by conventional or occult means. The idea of angels becomes replaced by the idea of egregore entities on a larger scale of consciousness, whilst demons become the smaller scale parts of ourselves that we find within. The former want from us obedience to the needs of the group, the latter just want their desires satisfied. Neither is entirely good nor bad. We must choose which needs to manifest at any one time.

Types of servitor

Given this model, we might choose to view the ‘statement of desire’ Spare used to construct a sigil as the simplest and lowest scale of consciousness. A single desire with a wish only to manifest and fulfil itself. Of course, sigils can represent more permanent intents and even come to represent godforms, so in reality they span the entire scale of what we might consider a servitor to be. At other times the type is determined by how we choose to relate to it, and with which techniques.

Lifespan

If a magician finds they keep needing the same spell over and over, they might create a simple, but reusable form of servitor. In the fractal consciousness model, this means allocating and training a part of the mind to do this task well, and learning to activate it through the use of some technique, such as a gesture, saying a name, visualising a sigil or image. The longevity of the servitor will in some way affect its nature. The longer it persists, the more likely it will evolve and grow. This should be expected. Mostly this evolution will increase the efficiency and success rate of the task performed. If it isn’t, then it’s continued use must be providing the magician with fulfilment of some other desire, and they had best discover what.

Of course, a magician may deliberately create a fairly complex egregore from the start, but this will usually be when they expect the entity to have a longer lifespan.

Physical form

A demon may communicate to us via a physical object, either one we constructed for the purpose, such as a sigil or poppet, one we purchased, such as a doll or figurine, or some naturally occurring form that enables us to make the sleight of mind necessary to believe we can communicate with the entity. Some magicians need more anthropomorphic or at least animal-like forms, whilst others can communicate directly to a plant, a stone or a car. I find it helps if I can see a face, even if I know its a pareidolia. But they may also communicate with us directly in our minds, sometimes with a vision, sometimes just a voice. Sometimes the entities communicate only feelings and emotions. Some have reported information being ‘downloaded’ into their minds.

A magician may choose in advance to create or use a physical form, they may just ‘happen’, and often do in the case of pareidolia, or the magician may contact the entity and ask them if they want a form. Some don’t seem to like them as much as others.

Magical tools

A magician may choose to relate to their magical tools as servitors. Last year I performed an eleven day evocation sequence, talking to two spirits a day for the period, starting and ending with talking to the pentacle itself as a spirit, in a magical operation I called a Summoning Storm. You can relate to other magical tools the same way, if you desire.

Divination systems, such as runes or tarot decks, may also be seen as having fractal consciousness. On the highest level you have the system in abstract, such as all tarot decks. Then a level down, the family of decks, such as the Thoth deck and its derivatives having a different spirit than ones based on the Smith-Waite deck. Then all decks with that particular art, and finally the magicians specific deck. The same can apply to specific cards, such as all Tower cards verses how the card manifests in particular deck, or in its relationship with a particular magician.

Spontaneous contact

One area often neglected in magical texts concerns contact not initiated by the magician. Even when the subject is treated, an assumption of hostility is usually assumed, when this need not be the case. In our experience entities that made first contact can prove amongst the most rewarding, and most weird to build a magical relationship with.

Techniques and relationships

The simplest technique is the single purpose servitor that simply does its thing when activated through its sigil, as mentioned above. A slightly more complex technique involves telling the servitor the desire to manifest. Suppose you often feel awkward in various social settings, you could use the former to simply give you confidence when activated. But if your awkwardness comes from over-confidence at certain times, too relaxed when you need to be alert, too alert when its safe to relax, then a more general servitor might be used to help you adjust. You could activate the servitor and instruct it to help you calm down or increase your alertness, focus or whatever you feel you need.

One way to view these types of relationships involves command and control. But the fractal consciousness model allows a more healthy way of viewing them. Instead of commanding the servitors to do things, you give that part of you permission to manifest, or behave the way you need. The spirit already wants to do the task, it just needs the rest of you to get out of the way.

Communication

However the next level of complexity up involves two way communication with the entity. No longer do we see the servitor as a passive entity awaiting your instructions, but an individual that may offer valuable feedback and advice. We may trade with it. It will do something for us if we do something for it. Trade might be a metaphor. Giving it the thing it asks for may actually be not so much a price as a useful symbolic act that allows the desire to manifest more easily.

Once the magician accepts this metaphor, trade can give way to friendship. The magician treats the spirit well, giving it space (such as a dedicated altar), time (regular friendly contact without asking for anything) and gifts (votive candles, decorations that give the altar a certain style). In such a relationship the servitors will reward the magician in many unexpected and interesting ways. Of course, the term ‘servitor’ becomes less descriptive of the entities in such a relationship. The trade relationship was already stretching the term servitor in terms of an accurate label. In a friendship relationship the magician and entity serve each other.

Service

The balance of apparent service can swing the other way. The magician may start to form a relationship that takes on the outward appearance of service to entity. At this point it starts to become more appropriate to refer to the entity with terms more like idol, godform or even a god or goddess. These might still be specially created by a magician or group of magicians, or chosen from one of the worlds many pantheons of deities, angels, saints, lwa, grimoiric demon princes, fictional characters or telepathic aliens and star beings.

The distinguishing factor between a magician serving a deity and religious worship, is that the magician engages in the relationship for the purpose of generating results, whilst the religious worshipper sees service to a deity as an end in and of itself. In practise the distinction may not prove obvious, for the sought after results may be a very slow and long term goal of transformation.

Evocation and Invocation

Two broad categories of spirit contact can be used in working with servitors and godforms. Evocation treats the entity as external, enabling the magician to talk to it as an ‘other’. You can practise this by imagining the conversation in your head. Don’t worry about whether the conversation is ‘real’, just record what comes, censoring as little as possible. You can evaluate it later. Don’t be concerned if it appears as non-sense, the more you practise the better the results.

Invocation differs in that you behave as the entity. Again, don’t worry if at first you feel clumsy with this. The more you practise the easier it becomes. Obviously invocation works better with more complex servitors that have developed a personality. I don’t know of many magicians that would bother to invoke a single use sigil, although maybe it has been tried by someone somewhere, maybe even with interesting results. In its more extreme forms invocation becomes possession, and may forget who they are for a time, or even have no accurate recollection of what they were doing. It can also resemble the kind of trances used by various mediums, and entities may wish to write down a lot of material through automatic writing, automatic speaking into a tape recorder, or various other methods. Invocations can also be long term, with the aim of permanent transformation of personality.

When your ritual is over, you may find that you ‘encounter’ the spirit in various ways over the subsequent days and weeks or even longer. This might be in dreams, pareidolia, people that remind you of the entity, the same or similar godforms appearing in films or books, or in advert posters in the street or on your most frequented websites. This is good. If you can treat all such additional contact experiences as a bonus, an extra chance to communicate with the entity, and record all such events in you diary, so much the better.

References

Introduction. Whilst I might get part three of this series up fairly soon, I may be posting these articles a couple of months apart. If you would like me to post them more frequently, you can encourage me to do so by becoming my patron. I will post the articles monthly once I have a minimum of $11 per month. By subscribing, you will also be helping to support KIA itself.

Its been sixteen years since I last tackled the subject of sigil magic as a writer and understandably my understanding of subject has evolved dramatically. Then I was writing for a group organised for teenage pagans called Minor Arcana. I wrote a chaos magic column for their magazine called ‘Liber Minor’, and for their website I knocked together a section called the ‘Liber Minor Well Wyrd Website’. My first attempt at writing about Sigils was for the website. Less than a year later I wrote a column on sigils for Minor Arcana’s magazine, Pagan Teenage Voice, with the title Theory 2 – The History of Austin Osman Spare style Sigils in Magic.

Whilst interesting introductions to the subject, these articles reflect more my young obsessions than my current understanding or practise, and I began exploring some of the differences in my thinking in my last article on the subject, Sigils, Servitors and Godforms. Also it is notable in ‘Theory 2’ that I was overly self-conscious about writing for a young audience and perhaps didn’t express my true views on drugs and sex with the confidence I would have wished. Of course I have used both myself with as much success as other methods of altering consciousness, and with the added bonus that they are both rather enjoyable methods of reaching such altered states. When I was saying I didn’t recommend them, I meant for the adolescent audience I was writing for. I mentioned them in the hopes that those that did do such things would read between the lines and try them anyway, since I said that they worked.

Secondly, I concentrated on Austin Osman Spare style sigils and their derivatives, and mostly ignored their precedents. Spares method, described in The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love), involves making a statement of desire, probably starting with words similar to ‘This my will to’, removing repeated letters and making a glyph from those that remain.

Of course, this method of making sigils was not entirely new. Agrippa gave examples of making sigils from Roman letters, from the names of angels and spirits, in the early 16th century. The technique has been used in pretty much any culture that has an alphabet, Agrippa also gives examples of Hebrew and Greek and praises the Arabic characters as combining with the most elegance. The way Spare makes use of sigils may also have a lot in common with their usage in goetic magic, according to Jake Stratton-Kent.

Spare’s real innovation here was in the use of a statement of desire, rather than the name of a spirit, as this bypassed the need to learn complex systems of correspondence and rulership. This is not to say that the latter method doesn’t work just as well, simply that Spare’s method, in its simplest form, requires learning only a single technique that can be applied to any desire. Once you know the technique, you can do magic for anything without further reference to any book.

Of course, if you take the trouble to memorise an entire system of correspondence, such as runes, goetia, i-ching or the tarot, then you can also use them just as automatically, but these tend not to be as easy to learn as Spare’s method. This makes it a great place to start for the magical beginner.

The technique also need not be simple, Spare himself used the simple technique to create an ‘alphabet of desire’ of commonly used sentence fragments and words that he could then combine to create combination sigils representing the full statement of desire. A new sigil would only need to be created for any word or phrase not currently covered by the reusable ones. Other magicians, have turned sigil art into a beautiful explosion of colours and shapes.

Jan Fries discusses many fun ways of coming up with sigils in his first book ‘Visual Magick’, including one based on automatic drawing, that has become one of my favourites. Automatic drawing and writing has been method in many cultures and is also of ancient lineage.

Another traditional method was based on mapping the letters of a word or phrase to numbers, choosing a magical square based on an appropriate planet, and tracing a line between the numbers.

In Chaos Monkey, Jaq D Hawkins discusses what she calls ‘rogression Sigils’. These are sigils cast as a sequence over a planned period of time. These might be one for each of the five elements, cast a week apart. Grant Morrison also discusses extending the sigil through the time dimension in what he called ‘HyperSigils’. His hypersigil trilogy is composed of three comic series, The Invisibles, Flex Mentallo and The Filth. In these he casts a character as himself, including autobiographical elements, and then attempts to shape his own future by writing it into the characters story. Similar to the sympathetic magic of poppets in witchcraft and folk-magic.

Spare, as an artist, illustrator and painter, favoured visual sigils, but other magicians may favour appeals to other senses. I mentioned using the letters of the sigil to create a mantra, but sound can also be used with a symbolic poem or song if you cared to write one. These can be repeated over and over to induce trance. Or you can hum, use a kazoo, play an instument, shake a rattle, beat a drum to create similar affects. Plus technology offers many exciting and experimental ways of working with sound.

You could also create an ‘alphabet of scent’, perhaps with a selection of essential oils keyed to each letter, or come up a similar technique based on taste or touch. Again these need not be created based on a statement of desire, but could be selected via some other method. Dana has recently experimented with an original technique of creating a magical oil blend based partly on an aromatherapy technique of choosing the favourite scents. One wonders what the resulting ‘scent sigil’ would be if we changed this from ‘favourite’ to ‘most associated with the desired result’. An idea to experiment with…

Introduction. Whilst I might get part two of this series up fairly soon, I may be posting these articles a couple of months apart. If you would like me to post them more frequently, you can encourage me to do so by becoming my patron. I will post the articles monthly once I have a minimum of $11 per month. By subscribing, you will also be helping to support KIA itself.

I recently restored an old chaos magic website, Liber Minor, whose content I originally wrote in May 1998. Obviously my ideas have moved on a lot since then, and I’ve decided it might prove a fun idea to explore each of the subjects I wrote about back then from my current perspective. As you can imagine, my understanding of the subjects will have changed considerably in the intervening 16 years.

The home page I will leave well alone as it is a beautiful, creative and quite ridiculous creation myth story and needs no comment. But the rest of the writing aims at a slightly more serious introduction to practical chaos magic techniques, divided into the three areas of sigils, servitors and godforms. As introductions to these subjects, these old articles aren’t bad. No doubt a reader could take them as a starting point from which to explore the subjects. My current view that categories such as sigils, servitors and godforms represent not so much three distinct groups of entities, so much as bands on a spectrum arbitrarily labelled, even seems at least partially evident in the servitor article.

However, whilst this serves at least as a partial bridge between the ideas of sigils and godforms it doesn’t quite go far enough in exploring the idea of sigils as spirits, rather than merely optional properties of spirits. And my contemporary view would encompass the idea of sigils as godforms, such as Ellis and the Linking Sigil as used by DKMU.

Over the next few months, I will write and publish updated articles on each of the subjects explored in Liber Minor, starting with Sigils, Servitors and Godforms, then branching into a re-exploration of the specific topics of Eris, Discordianism, Baphomet, Khorne, Tzeentch, Nurgle, Slaanesh and ending with an essay on the Lovecraft mythos. These will form a kind of ‘Liber Minor Revisited’.

Whilst I might get part one of this series up fairly soon, I may be posting these articles a couple of months apart. If you would like me to post them more frequently, you can encourage me to do so by becoming my patron. I will post the articles monthly once I have a minimum of $11 per month. By subscribing, you will also be helping to support KIA itself.

Advice, Promises and Commitments

During that 11 day period communicated with many spirits and learned a great deal. I also promised the spirits some things. Some of the promises were ongoing commitments, whilst some of the should be actioned within a certain time frame.

Promises to be kept as a matter of priority:

Collect litter from the forest.

Restore the KIA Speaks feature of the KIA website.

House trolls must come to the wedding.

Give name to Yellow doll.

Give the Red doll a new name.

Remember name of Green doll. (I have done this now)

Name the Octarine doll.

Name all other unnamed dolls.

Name all so far unnamed house trolls (with Lolita).

Paint the back of the pentacle in the style of the photo of the tree cross section I took a while back, but ammend it to resemble the wheel of the year. Add a small pentagram to the center of this.

Make a code that represents the number of days, the minimum evocations per day and total number of evocations and mark this against the part of the wheel of the year at which the operation was performed.

Develop glamour of my ‘riest/Ideological’ self.

Develop glamour of my ‘Business’ self.

At Halloween/Samhain, place grave lanterns over the places in the garden we buried dead birds.

Develop a better understanding of the anima and animus concepts from Jung, and once done make a statue of Diana based on my mature understanding of woman.

Commitments to permanent changes in behaviour:

Prioritise love.

Make sure Wedding is primary focus this year.

Make friends out of love, accepting who they are, not what I can get out of them or hope to do with them. Don’t make friends hoping for sex. Don’t make friends hoping for magical group members. Don’t make friends hoping to obtain entheogens.

Stop confusing a fear of loving something with feeling sick of it. It becomes an obstacle to long term love.

Try and learn to be a better listener. Learn not to drift off into my thoughts when people are speaking about boring stuff.

Collaborate with others more. Join in their collaborative projects. Make more of my own projects collaborative.

Work with Dragon Environmental Network to help protect red kites and hunting birds.

Call orange doll ‘eeair’ from now on. She wasn’t too fond of ‘eeaye’.

Don’t rush off to speak to others when it would prematurely end a conversation you were having with someone else. See things through.

But do check that others present consent to the topic being discussed.

Also, try and notice when people are speaking words from their brain that disagree with their hearts, or words from their hearts that disagree with what they think. In both cases it is a warning sign of a disconnect resulting from some kind of hurt. Try to be patient with such people and listen to where their hurt comes from, rather than arguing with their words.

Learn to remember peoples names better.

Other advice I was given:

Life is good. Do not waste it.

Write a Discordian style magic book, based on the Chaosphere, but with fun style ‘operations’.

Make a booklet for this summoning storm operation.

Contact my grandmothers as ancestral spirits.

Perform a similar operation for the cup and divination.

Perform a similar operation for the sword and invocation.

Perform a similar operation for the wand and enchantment.

I think making this list is a useful way of summarising the advice that came from my spirit contact.